“Verify a feed reference”

Symptom

You publish updates through a Swarm feed (an (owner, topic) pair). A consumer reports they can’t read the latest update; you want to confirm whether the current feed payload is retrievable from the network.

Diagnose

Pass the feed handle directly — bee-check resolves it first, then probes the resolved chunk reference:

bee-check feed:<40-hex-owner>:<64-hex-topic> \
  --bee https://my-bee.example \
  --bee https://b.example

The output includes a resolution block recording the original handle and the resolved reference:

resolved feed:
  owner   1234...abcd
  topic   5678...beef
  ref     c79394...bdc36a

status  Partial

Two failure modes look different:

• Feed lookup itself failed — error mentions feeds endpoint and you get no resolution. Probably means the feed has no published updates on this Bee’s view, or the owner/topic is wrong. Re-run against a different --bee to rule out a single-node visibility issue.
• Feed resolved fine but the payload is unretrievable — same as any other reference-unretrievable case. Continue with --per-chunk to see which chunks are missing where.

Fix

If the resolved reference is the lost-upload case, see the lost- upload chapter.

If the feed itself didn’t resolve, check that your last update was actually published — swarm-cli feed update returning success isn’t quite the same as the soc chunk being retrievable network-wide. Wait a few seconds and re-probe; feeds are stored like any other chunk and propagate through the same neighborhood.